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MUSIC; Don't Call It a String Quartet. It's a Band.

EVERY month, dozens of ambitious, hungry young bands play in the cramped confines of the KnitActive Sound Stage, downstairs at the Knitting Factory in TriBeCa. So an appearance there tonight by Ethel, a four-piece band hoping that the club's downtown cachet will attract a new audience, may seem nothing unusual. Yet Ethel is basically a classical string quartet, and its concert of works by John King, Phil Kline and Julia Wolfe is part of Sonic Boom, a festival presented by the New York Consortium for New Music, which promotes contemporary classical music.

''What image does a string quartet put in your head?'' asked Mary Rowell, an intense violinist who has played a prominent role in new-music and alternative rock scenes for more than 20 years. ''A dour group of people playing perfectly together in perfect harmony. That's not the path that I wanted to go down.''

In 1998, Ms. Rowell was hired for a recording session along with Todd Reynolds, another violinist, Ralph Farris, a violist, and Dorothy Lawson, a cellist. The collaboration of these extraordinarily skilled, passionate musicians sparked a surge of creative energy and potential. ''It felt like a group of friends forming a band,'' Ms. Rowell said.

Tapping into a rapidly changing new-music scene, Ethel has graduated with remarkable speed from isolated performances at the Cutting Room, Galapagos and Joe's Pub, which normally feature offbeat strands of popular music, to an extensive string of concerts and series this season. Those appearances, ranging from the club date tonight to a Lincoln Center debut in May, are intended to show different facets of the group's evolving approach to presenting concert music in the 21st century.

Before coming together, the Ethel players were among the busiest freelance musicians in New York. They had performed individually and together in establishment mainstays like the American Symphony Orchestra, Orpheus and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as well as in new-music ensembles, including the Bang on a Can All-Stars.

Each player also had extensive experience outside classical music. Ms. Rowell was a member of the Silos, a noted rock band, and she performed and recorded with the pop singers Joe Jackson and Sheryl Crow. Mr. Reynolds, who composes and conducts, improvised with wild abandon as a member of the Mahavishnu Project, an electric jazz-fusion band, and appeared onstage as a dancing fiddler in the Broadway revival of ''Annie, Get Your Gun.'' Ms. Lawson played regularly with the Brazilian jazz pianist Marcelo Zarvos and performed in the pit band for an Off Broadway musical, Jason Robert Brown's ''Last Five Years.'' Mr. Farris served as music director for the Who vocalist Roger Daltrey and as an arranger and orchestrator for pop recordings.

Such diversity is expected of freelance musicians, especially in New York, where conventional work prospects can be scarce. In a difficult economic climate, orchestras and presenters hire fewer soloists, increasingly relying on a handful of guaranteed best sellers.

''For my generation graduating from university, the careers we had been prepared for already didn't exist,'' Ms. Lawson said. ''We had to go out and feel our way along and come up with a lot of things that we'd love to do instead.''

Those activities were also responses to challenges within the classical world itself. In school, both Ms. Rowell and Mr. Reynolds encountered resistance from instructors when they tried to bring new music by Philip Glass and Steve Reich into an academic setting. For all four musicians, now in their 30's and 40's, it was natural as well to work in the popular musical forms of their upbringing.

They were already aware of one another when they joined forces for the first time in the recording studio. The excitement they felt while playing together, combined with the diverse musical tastes and experiences they shared, led them to conclude that they could create a performing situation that would address all their artistic interests; in time, perhaps, it might even generate steady work without compromise.

Styling themselves a band rather than a string quartet allowed them to sidestep the pressures of classical music tradition and expectation. ''A band doesn't necessarily have an allegiance to anything,'' Mr. Reynolds said. ''A group of four guys, of four girls, of mixed folks gets together and says, 'We want to present an idea.' There's no tradition about this behavior, necessarily. You're just putting an idea out there.''

The quartet called itself Hazardous Materials for its earliest concerts, a name soon dropped for its negative connotations. As the players considered other names, Ms. Rowell remembered a scene from the movie ''Shakespeare in Love'': Shakespeare racked with writer's block as he tried to complete a play called ''Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter.'' Ms. Rowell suggested Ethel as a name. Improbably, it stuck.

The group adopted many trappings of popular culture, producing stylish press kits, establishing a Web site with vivid graphics and downloadable MP3 files (www.ethelcentral.com) and participating in a live Webcast. It incorporated lighting, video, choreography and other rock elements in its presentations.

STILL, if Ethel were truly to be a band instead of a string quartet, the music would have to reflect the distinction. The group took up works by young composers who shared its diverse interests, including Mr. King and Ms. Wolfe, who both compose in rock-influenced styles.

''The string quartet goes together like singer, guitar, bass and drums,'' Mr. King said. ''It's a thing in itself that is a great voice for putting out musical ideas.'' Ms. Wolfe added, ''It's the closest classical group I can think of to a rock band.''

The Kronos Quartet long ago abolished the hegemony of establishment composers by commissioning all manner of musical artists to write string quartets. Ethel has taken the process a step farther. During some concerts, the players improvise new material to segue between compositions, creating a flow the way D.J.'s do when spinning records, something that might give pause to even the most open-minded composer.

''I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about that,'' said Ms. Wolfe, a Bang on a Can composer whose spiky, dissonant works have quickly become an Ethel specialty. ''But they did it really tastefully, and there was still an acknowledgment of the composers who were making the pieces.''

All those elements, and undoubtedly others, will be in evidence in three concerts that Ethel will present at the Kitchen in Chelsea from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2. Mr. King, the Kitchen's music director, booked the series as a coming-out for the group, which will present programs illustrating several aspects of its wide-ranging vision. Among the works to be presented on the first night -- appropriately for Halloween -- is a piece based on the writings of Poe, collaboratively composed by the four members.

Beginning in February, Ethel will present a series at the Miller Theater of Columbia University, devoted chiefly to the quartets of Ms. Wolfe and John Zorn. Each program will also include at least one premiere. Then in May, Ethel takes its countercultural approach to the altar of classical music culture, performing works by Mr. King, Mr. Reynolds and Evan Ziporyn in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's new-music series Double Exposure.

Ethel's timing has been serendipitous, a fact not lost on its members. But more important to them is the pleasure they take in one another's company, which is apparent both on stage and off. Egalitarian ambitions aside, their partnership is ultimately based on mutual understanding and acceptance.

''We're four extroverts that in a lot of instances have felt like sore thumbs,'' Mr. Farris says, ''and we found three other thumbs to go along.''